Chapter 82
Stardate 48284.3 - April 14, 2371 - 18:28:00
"A sociopath?" Raine repeated as she stared down at Jadzia, the Trill woman laid out on her bed clutching a pillow to her chest in a way that suggested to the Asari that she was absolutely not having a good day.
"It's the closest analogy
Federation Standard has to the condition." Jadzia admitted with a grimace as she clutched the pillow a bit tighter. "But it's the feeling I've been getting from the memory block each time Specialist Na'Tal melds with me."
That certainly fit with what little Raine remembered about the host in question, though it opened up several questions about the quality of the Trill mental health system given it suggested they were unable to detect and treat the man.
"Look on the bright side." Raine offered with a consoling smile. "That's actually not so bad as far as these things go."
Jadzia buried her face in the bed and groaned before looking back up at Raine. "The annoying thing is I know you're right."
"You do?" Raine asked in surprise.
"I spent some of my down time yesterday going over similar cases with Julian." Jadzia explained with a cringing look that suggested she hadn't been quite prepared for the particular brand of evil that tended to follow those kinds of cases around.
"It really is just criminal, medical, and roleplay." Raine confirmed as she took a moment to let her eyes wander around the room.
"Roleplay?" Jadzia repeated, her depression momentarily forgotten in favor of shooting Raine an odd look that suggested she couldn't quite work out how the two things connected.
"The textbook example of that one is a pair of Betazoids who, on their first wedding anniversary, went out to a club and decided to try and recreate their first date by temporarily blocking each other's memory of everything that came after it."
"Oh no." Jadzia muttered.
"Oh yes." Raine confirmed with an amused grin. "The next morning they both woke up with the block having come apart, in a different strangers bed."
Which just went to show that even in the far future of the 24th century, couples in love could still be complete dumbasses.
"Please tell me it gets worse from there." Jadzia pleaded, grasping desperately onto the distraction now that it had been handed to her.
Raine gave the Trill a wry smile. "The woman the husband took to bed called the authorities because all of the sudden his mind felt completely different to her than it had the night before. So they show up with the mistaken idea that he blocked his own memory to cheat on his wife."
"Meanwhile the wife was in a panic because they had recently decided to try for children, so she'd taken a counter to her birth control injection a couple weeks back, and she could tell the man she'd slept with wasn't on one either. He picked up on that panic and called the authorities because he didn't want anything to do with that and had no idea what else to do."
"So they both get dragged into the local security office, only for the senior investigator to take one look at the pair and figure out what's going on. At which point he reported them to their families before assigning them both to six months of remedial safety courses."
"And someone put the whole thing in a textbook?" Jadzia questioned in between giggles.
"Betazoids have very few boundaries." Raine answered with a shudder that wasn't even slightly feigned.
Jadzia pulled herself up into a cross legged position. "VIP transport duty?"
"VIP transport duty." Raine confirmed with a nod as she flashed back to the mortifying experience of a pair of Betazoid overcompensating because they couldn't read more then scattered bits of her surface thoughts. "Why I was more than happy to dump Ambassador Troi on Odo."
"Curzon always felt Ambassador Troi was a bit of an acquired taste." Jadzia agreed with a grin.
"He didn't!?" Raine gasped as she tried very hard not to imagine that particular pair together.
"No." Jadzia admitted with a wry smile and light shake of her head. "Though not from any lack of trying. Lwaxana just had him figured out on the first day they met."
"And she told him?" Raine inquired, having a hard time seeing the Betazoid woman let anyone off the hook that easily when she could instead leave it unsaid and bask in the attention.
"She told me." Jadzia offered, biting her bottom lip to keep from giggling. "Last year."
"I swear." Raine muttered with an amused shake of her head. "I wouldn't be surprised to find out one day that her entire over the top persona is just an act she puts on to throw everyone else off in various ways."
"You and half the Federation's diplomatic corps." Jadzia agreed with an amused snort.
Raine could easily believe it, because even as limited as hers was, experience had taught her there was nothing that particular group of people enjoyed more than gossip.
"You know, since we're talking about our pasts." The Trill put forward with an innocent tone that instantly set Raine on edge. "I've always wondered, what actually happened on the Sutherland?"
"Temporal Prime Directive." Raine confessed with a shrug as she took a seat on the comer of Jadzia's bed.
A skeptical look flashed across the Trill's face. "Seriously?"
"Well, ish." Raine said, making a so-so motion with her hand. "Do you know what a
Time Crystal is?"
"Of course." Jadzia confirmed with a nod.
"The Sutherland recovered one from somewhere and was transporting it to somewhere else." She held up a hand to forestall Jadzia a she opened her mouth to ask the obvious question. "I was a Junior Lieutenant at the time and just straight up don't know."
"Mid mission the crystal overloads, and temporal distortions fracture the ship across multiple points in space-time."
An intrigued look came over Jadzia's face. "How'd you reverse it?"
"We didn't." Raine said grimly. "We spent the next three hundred some years figuring out how to seal the fracture to allow the ship to escape, and then about twelve hours after the fracture first formed the portion of the ship that was roughly congruent to the present time was contacted by seventeen questionably sane versions of me who had traveled through time the long way to put that plan into motion."
Jadzia blinked, and Raine could all but see the Trill trying to work through the temporal weirdness the Asari had just described.
"Some of the crew that were caught in those parts of the ship when the different temporal branches formed were able to save themselves via Stasis pod. But after sealing the fractures and doing a headcount the Sutherland ended up losing about a third of its crew."
Most of which had been by suicide due to the need to preserve resources to keep those never-were versions of herself alive long enough to accomplish the plan. But there was no need to bring the mood down any more than it already had been given her goal was to help Jadzia forget about the stress that had been piling up the past few days, if only for a few hours.
"Guess this means Julian wins the pool." Jadzia mused, ending the brief silence in a way that left Raine blinking in bemusement.
"The pool?" She repeated, really hoping that wasn't what it sounded like.
"The rest of the senior staff took bet's on the general theme of the event." Jadzia confirmed with a wry grin. "Julian picked time travel."
"And the rest?" Raine asked, curious despite herself.
"I went with an alternate dimension encounter." Jadzia began with a shrug. "O'Brien guessed that you ran into a lost precursor civilization, Kira thought it might have been Q, and Benjamin figured it was probably an intelligence gathering mission gone wrong."
"The funny thing is." Raine added in with an amused smile. "With how little I know about the mission behind the event, it could actually include all of those things."
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Stardate 48286.3 - April 15, 2371 - 11:59:00
"And there've been a handful of pirate attacks around the Temecklia system ." Raine finished, passing the unsummarized padd over the Commander's desk so he could look it over later if he felt the need.
"Free Colonies?" Sisko asked in interest as he set the padd down.
"Long range scans have caught traces of an Orion warp signature." Raine expanded, having originally thought that herself given the way the attacks seemed to be focusing on automated cargo vessels.
"So family." Sisko returned with a good natured grin.
"Probably not." Raine returned, rolling her eyes at the joke. "Jellaa operates mostly around the Risian sector and prefers targeting manned ships so she can ransom valuable passengers or crew back to whoever can pay."
Which had taken multiple years of work on Raine's part to convince Jella to switch to. A fact that still annoyed her to this day given she'd yet to admit that Raine had been right, even though she knew for an absolute fact that the Orion woman being known locally as 'the pirate that can be paid off' had increased her ships profit margins by a factor of five.
"Your doing?" Sisko guessed as he studied her face.
"I may have spent several years trying to reform her before giving up on the prospect." Raine confessed, briefly turning her head away, unable to fully meet Sisko's eyes. "Convincing her that there were better ways to pirate than blowing up ships, stealing their cargo, and selling their surviving crew was one of my very few successes."
"Interesting way to go about it." Sisko offered with a contemplative look.
"Pirating is an integral part of their culture." Raine admitted, her tone making it clear how little respect she had for that. "And Jellaa wasn't really the type who wanted to get away from that. So I tried to work around it in a way that would get her to the end point of realizing that she could keep the fun parts of being a pirate without all the horrible bits."
"I have some good news on a different front." Sisko artfully changed the subject as he spun around the monitor on his desk to display a very generic looking Starfleet form. "Starfleet has approved the transfer of last generation sensor equipment to the Bajorans."
"Kira's going to love that." Raine mused, the Bajoran woman having been rather vocal about just how bad the sensors on Bajor's nascent fleet were compared to those on the Defiant. "Just make sure she knows she can't borrow the Chief to oversee integration. "
"The thought had crossed my mind." Sisko returned with a knowing grin. "Not the least because we need him intact, and I'm pretty sure Keiko would kill him if he tried to put even more work on his plate."
"Sounds about right." Raine agreed with a smirk, having heard more than one complaint from Keiko about the way Miles was practically holding the station together on his lonesome.
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Author's Notes: Transitional chapter this time, next one will be the first, and if Quark has anything to say about it hopefully last, battle of Quark.
